There is no evidence that Lin Wood and Sidney Powell are secretly working for the Democratic National Committee, but no one has definitively disproved it, either.
That’s the kind of conspiratorial reasoning that the Wood-Powell duo, with their deep commitment to wild and unfalsifiable charges, might apply to themselves.
The two Trump-allied lawyers have made themselves into wrecking balls against the Republican Party of Georgia, whose top elected officials, they allege, are involved in the most dastardly and far-reaching conspiracy in American history.
This might be only a bizarre footnote to the 2020 election, if their charges weren’t being amplified by the president of the United States and didn’t come at a time when the Georgia GOP needs all of its voters to turn out in the two January runoff elections that will determine control of the Senate.
According to Wood-Powell, Dominion voting machines were used to rob President Donald Trump of his rightful landslide in Georgia, with Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, both Republicans, in on the fix, aided and abetted by foreign enemies of the United States.
The rot runs so deep that, per the duo, Republicans should boycott the runoffs. Or, as Wood put it at their bonkers joint rally on Wednesday in Georgia, the governor should resign and go to jail.
If this turmoil contributes to a Republican debacle, it would be the dumbest and most unnecessary loss since Steve Bannon decided in the 2017 Alabama Senate special election that it’d be a brilliant idea to run Roy Moore, the one Republican noxious and scandal-plagued enough to lose to a Democrat.
Ideally, the Georgia races would be about President-elect Joe Biden and stopping his agenda. Instead, Trump and his fraud claims have become a wedge issue, making it harder for Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler to bridge the gap between Trump’s base and suburban voters.
Trump is clearly of two minds. He can’t admit that he lost Georgia and will endorse any lunatic theory to explain away his defeat. At the same time, he knows his political legacy is caught up in the outcome of the Senate races.
So, he attacks the top Republicans in the state at the same time he promotes Perdue and Loeffler.
Nothing will ever be enough to satisfy him and his allies about the Georgia vote. The other day, Trump pounded Kemp for not matching absentee ballots with their envelopes and checking their signatures. But the signatures were checked twice already.
In Georgia, first, the signature on an absentee ballot request is checked against the voter registration card. Then, when the ballot is sent in, the signature on the envelope is checked against both the ballot request and the voter registration card.
When Wood and Powell were asked at their Wednesday rally about the hand recount that should have put to bed the Dominion theory, Powell denied there was a full hand recount and said, regardless, Georgia’s election system is built to skew recounts, too.
One can only conclude that if Georgia allowed Wood and Powell to choose a team of forensic scientists to inspect ballots in a hermetically sealed examination room guarded by Navy SEALs, they’d still come up with a reason why the count had been subverted if it showed Biden ahead.
Perhaps Republican voters will ignore all of this come January. But there’s a reason parties seek unity before important elections. At best, Wood-Powell are distracting from the GOP message in the races and, at worst, convincing persuadable Georgians that it is the Republican Party that needs to be checked, not Joe Biden.
Certainly, the Wood-Powell logic supports sitting this one out. There’s no reason to bother voting if Georgia is controlled by politicians on the take who use technology to predetermine the outcome of elections.
Who needs actual agents of the DNC if this is what the most fervent allies of Donald Trump are saying?
Rich Lowry
Rich Lowry is editor of National Review.
Twitter, @RichLowry